This weekend the Donald took some heavy duty flack from liberals, Dems, the MSM and harrumphing patriots for canceling his appearance at a wreath laying ceremony at the famous WWI battle site at Belleau, France owing to inclement weather. For instance, former Secretary of State, John Kerry got himself worked into high dudgeon:

Mr. Kerry criticized the president's decision on Twitter, saying that the weather "shouldn't have stopped an American President".

"President @realDonaldTrump a no-show because of raindrops?" he wrote. "Those veterans the president didn't bother to honor fought in the rain, in the mud, in the snow – & many died in trenches for the cause of freedom."

We truly wonder whether Mr. Kerry gets the monumental irony. In his youth he was a courageous leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement based on the insanity of America's role in a needless war in Southeast Asia of which he was a veteran.

Yet the only war of the 20th century more senseless than Vietnam was the so-called Great War, and most especially America's intervention in an old world tragedy for no good reason whatsoever. That is to say, the Marine heroes of the bloody battle of Belleau Wood did not die "in the trenches for the cause of freedom."

To the contrary, they died there owing to the fanatical megalomania of President Woodrow Wilson. The latter maneuvered America into the Great War in April 1917 when it was nearly over, and for the purpose of giving himself a grand seat at the peace conference afterward to reshape the world in accordance with his messianic vision.

That was a horrible reason in itself for the 116,000 deaths of American servicemen during the less than 12 months that they were actually engaged in battle at the tail end of the war. The real tragedy of their sacrifice and the real crime of Wilson's pointless intervention was that it snatched victory for the allies, who didn't deserve it, from the jaws of stalemate among the militarily exhausted, financially bankrupt and politically demoralized combatants on both sides of the conflict.

In a word, save for Wilson's intervention the war would have been over in 1917. In consequence, there would have been a peace of the exhausted, not the vindictive, destructive peace of the "victors" at Versailles, which paved the way for Lenin and Stalin in Russia and Hitler and the totalitarian mobilizations that fostered World War II and the Cold War beyond.

That is to say, the 100-year anniversary of the Armistice of November 11, 1918 is not about just another historical date passing a big round number. Instead, it is a reminder that the Great War and the Carthaginian Peace which followed was the incubator for almost all the ills of the next 100 years – and not just the Stalinist nightmare in Russia, Nazi Germany and the holocaust or the long gray night of Cold War during which the Nuclear Sword Of Damocles hung precariously over the planet.

It also gave rise to the Big Government interventionist state in America; turned the Federal Reserve from a decentralized "bankers' bank" into an all-powerful fiscal arm of Washington and eventually the monetary central planner for the nation; and most insidiously of all, generated the baleful notion of America as the Indispensable Nation and the follies of Empire which have flowed therefrom.